


Sagittarius

by saddletrampboyfriend



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Cowboy AU, M/M, Tenderness, Vignette, i didnt think this through at all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-28 18:48:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20068837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saddletrampboyfriend/pseuds/saddletrampboyfriend
Summary: A final meeting.*imagine me leaning in really close to you and stage whispering "i just really wanted to write cowboy au!!"*





	Sagittarius

Through the newborn sparks of the fire, Jim can see the shadow approach. It is half man, half horse, and it makes him dizzy.

The silhouette - which isn’t really what it looks like - is still far-off, across the field, but it grows, and becomes comprehensible. Something in his throat seems to grow with it. His hands planted around his coffee cup begin to shake like they picked up on some sort of magnet, and when the shadow is so big it begins to play with the cast of the fire, he looks down at his boots, raises the cup to his mouth, and pretends not to be hanging onto the tip of it. In the quiet night, the stamp of hooves against the flattened grass pound hardly louder than his heartbeat, and come to a halt right in front of his campsite.

Jim swallows his cup, holding the contents in his mouth long enough to forget, and stares at the fire until he can see the tongues against his closed eyelids, swallows, and finally, finally looks up.

“I didn’t know you’d come.” The figure in the dark, the leaping firelight, is nearly too much, and he laughs to conceal it, struggles for something more to say, however crass. “It must be 4 A.M. by now.”

He comes down from his horse in one clean leap, in the dark Jim can’t tell who it is he’s brought tonight, and leads them to Jim’s, tying them to the same tree. Not speaking yet. His hat pulled low, Jim can see his lips, that’s all. Of all things, his lips. He clenches his teeth, pokes at the fire as the visitor stalks to the fireside, lowers himself down, cross-legged on the grass clear across from Jim. 

“Are you hungry?”

A shake of his head. His lips are beginning to press together, how they do when he’s anxious.

“I didn’t really mean that. I knew you were coming.” 

The silence is like a blanket, like the steady heat around them from the dying summer. Jim watches his lips and hands, his unsteady hands, coming up to the brim of his hat, the tendons moving under the backs of them as he removes it, slowly lowers it between his knees. His full face coming into view like the cold moon face in the firelight - he’s pretty. Like the moon. Like the glittering stream through the woods. He looks down at his hands. He still does not speak. 

“Do you remember when you broke your ankle, two summers ago?” Jim blurts out. “Do you remember when we were scouts together? That night you couldn’t sleep, and went off without me?”

His eyebrows lift on his face, easier, like the air had been punctured, as was leaking slowly out of their world. His mouth might twitch, that final stitch on the right side, the small, red-black dot that carved his dimples, but it may be a trick of the light.

“Do you remember that horse? That wild horse you rode around, and pretended you could handle?”

The horse’s name was Comet. A black, furious thing, that Spock tried his best to break in. When Jim went after him that might he remembers, sleepy, fumbling to mount his own, not anxious for him, but driven to follow him nonetheless, and then coming across him, seeing him like a phantom in the trees, spread out on the forest floor. He knew on the spot that the fucking horse had finally lost it and bucked him. Spock could’ve done it, too. He was good with horses, the wildest ones, that fact earned him work. And he might be dead, attacked, trampled. Because of a fox or something in the horse’s way. Because it was dark.

Jim remembers closing his eyes tight before demounting, walking to him, meeting his eyes below him. Flat on his back, one arm up behind his head, a look of complete peace. As if he had just sprung up. As if he had been lying, waiting for Jim. He can see him in the hazy window of memory, in greens and browns and the faded blue of his shirt. The paleness of his skin.

“Remember when I found you in the woods, and I was so scared what had happened to you, but you just looked at me, and I started laughing?”

He had laughed. He had looked down at him, nestled in that grass, his short hair damp with the dew, saying nothing, and he hadn’t known what to do but laugh. Spock hadn’t laughed back, but he had smiled - he was pretty, and when he opened his mouth, those perfect, bowed lips, he had expected poetry. When he opened his mouth, still looking up at Jim like an omen, and spoken the most beautiful words to him, Jim only laughed harder. He would never forget those words. “I think I broke my damn ankle.” Back then he was so awkward about swearing. He only did it to impress Jim, he mixed the words all up. Back at the fireside, Jim has to clench his hands. They both have the most unsteady hands.

When that cold truth sank in, and Jim sank to his knees in the grass, and reached for his outstretched legs in their denim, he feels along his left ankle and he gasps and it is beautiful. Jim laughed again. Took the hem of his jeans and rolled it, pressed along his pale skin where it was red, sensitive. How Spock tried not to show how it hurt him. Jim had called his horse, and bent to him, Spock leaning on him with that one leg held just off the ground, his shirt smelling of grass and sweat where he holds him. He had to carry him in front of him on the horse. His nose had brushed his shoulder, His knees under Spock’s. That was the first time he thought about him. How his long legs fit over his like that, against the horse’s ribs. The three of them piled together as one. 

Spock is looking at him fully now, face raised towards him, and Jim remembers the bruise. How, back at camp, he had tried to splint it, and not done very good at it. It was years ago. Spock wasn’t so skinny. Jim had less scars. A lot has changed, not only in tangibility.

“Why are you telling me this?” Even his voice had changed.

“What’s going to happen to us?” Jim hears himself say, out of nowhere. “If we stay like this.” 

Spock gets the same look on his face as when Jim touched his ankle those years ago.

When he was much younger, before he had even met Spock, Jim would dream of stars. Now, he cranes his head back, fills his vision with the blackness. The freckled bodies across the field. If he believed in the same old things, about now he would like to find that northmost one and follow it as far as he could. But he isn’t so sure anymore. The cosmos bucked harder than any wild horse, after all, and he doesn’t have the willpower of Spock. And yet, they comforted him. Like watching a wild herd at the coast. Milling around, Centaurus, Sagittarius, and the rest. 

Shaking hands, shaking legs, he stands and walks out a few yards. Hands wrapped around the back of his neck, sight still consumed by infinity. A breeze fills the plain, sweeping over him and Spock and buffeting their little fire, but not drowning it. He hears the rush of it in the grass and the trees and around Spock too. He misses him more than anything, even as close as he is now. The thought of him apart from Jim every single day has filled him with yearning he has never known. 

When Jim looks from one universe to another, the dark spot back with the horses, he is already in motion. Setting his hat aside, raising quietly to his feet, Spock is already moving towards him. That thing in his throat from before kicks Jim in the ribs. He can see the rip in his sleeve, he can see the prickling shadow along his jaw, and the gleam in his eyes, so suddenly close, so wide. A hand on his arm, so politely positioned at his elbow, his face slamming against his so carelessly. Or maybe heedless, maybe just anxious. 

Spock’s lips hit him like the point of a star hitting the atmosphere, or like your body hits the dirt in a corral, or an arrow from the bow of Orion. Like fire. Undirected violence, only a matter of gravity pulling things this way and that against one another. Jim won’t ever understand it, he didn’t in school, and he won’t try again to now. He knows what he feels, and it doesn’t need an explanation. 

In the grass, something knocks against his boot, and he finds it to be another boot, searching for the attention of the other, like a puppy, or another heedless thing, caused by more gravity, Spock holding him with both hands now, sinking into the cradle of his shoulder, releasing a colossal, wavering breath that carries everything from him. Jim feels his pulse, hammering under his ear, against Jim’s fingers. He slides the hand up, sticks his fingers in his smooth hair, that smooth hair he always envied, dark and shining, black in the dark, warm coffee in the light. He had hair you always thought was black, and then you’d see him up on horseback in the middle of the day, or standing up on the fence at the old ranch in those halcyon days they worked together, with his hat in his hands, a breeze ruffling his shirt and making his bangs stand up, and you realized it was brown after all. You’d realize more than that, but it would all start with noticing that gentle fact. 

Jim runs his hand all through that hair, behind his one elfen ear, and then thumbs the tip of it, where the shell had always sort of curled in, ever since he was a baby, for no real reason. Another gentle fact. Spock’s arms around him, heavy, growing heavier. Jim drops to his knees fast, winds both arms around his thighs, and presses the side of his face to his hip. He feels two hands cover his shoulders, but still, nothing is said. Just that was enough. That simple thing.

For ages Jim looks out across the field. In the distance, the shadow of his home and the ranch around it. It occurs to him that he is content never to see it again, if it meant seeing Spock.

“I have an idea.” He hears his voice clear and full, despite the twisted knot of muck in his throat. Spock’s fingers moving against the collar of his shirt, not holding it, touching it like the mane of his horse, idly, repetitive. Finally he speaks again. His voice is like hot water in Jim’s throat. Deep and steady.

“What’s the idea?”

“I think we should take our horses, and my inheritance, and your guitar, and we should just go. Just leave. No more sneaking around, no more of your father’s damn opinions on your life. Just go somewhere else.” He feels one hand tense. The mention of his father. The bane of both their lives. He leans back, and Spock drops down in front of him, knees on either sides of his own, brushing like they did on the horse. Jim wants his ankle broken again, if it was the only way to grant him that closeness again. That trust between them. He knows it is an awful thought. “America’s big, Spock. We could ride anywhere we wanted, find work where we could. We could go to Iowa, stay in my old house, or anything. We could find my brother. Whatever we do, it would be up to us. Up to you.” Now he sees him on the fence again, at a new house. Somewhere just for the two of them. With his guitar, on the front porch. Somewhere he wouldn’t be scared to sing. 

“This is all very presumptuous, you know.” 

“Spock,, you have to let him go. You cant let him decide your life forever.”

“I never said I was.” 

“So you’re admitting to it happening now?”

Spock does not often give looks. When his eyes flick upwards from where they’ve been lingering around Jim’s collar, it speaks louder than if he had pulled him close and shouted. But he looks down again, and his chest rises slowly, and the hand still at his neck tightens. He thinks of it tightening at the neck of a guitar. 

“I have my reasons for not confronting my father about his influence over me.”

“You think he might know.”

“Among other things, yes. That is why it has been so difficult to meet you lately.”

“-and either way we'd have to run. Why not go for it while we're ahead, huh? I’ll end up asking either way, and you’ll have to make the decision soon enough.” 

“It would not be easy.”

“It would be easier. At least I’d see you.” Something vivid comes to his mind, another old memory. He is full of memories of a better time, a time where they weren’t both so heavy. “Remember that time, in that bar? When I got in trouble with those guys in a poker game, and you were the one to drag me out? I had no idea what was going on. I thought I was going to die, and then I saw you, and I still thought I was gonna die. But you cared enough for me that you came and got me. At least I had that." Spock’s hands at his neck again. His strong jaw, and the silent, hardened look on his face. Back in the field, his eyebrows furrow, and he closes his eyes tight as he answers.

"That was completely different."

"Was it?"

His eyes are full of the stars when they open again. Jim feels his hands start to shake, like they want to reach into that universe and pick them out. In that stunning silence, where neither of them have anything more to say, and know it, he realizes the fire has started to die, popping, and crackling out its death throes behind them. Their two horses are still, standing quiet in the dim orange light, a reminder of their capabilities, of Jim’s proposal. He thinks back over all the horses they’ve ever ridden. All the names, it always had to be something poetic, something pretty. Him and Spock will change their names if they skip town after all, and those names will be poetic, too. But it wouldn’t matter. Under any name, he would still be Spock.

In his last bout of trembling desperation, Jim raises his hands to his rough jaw, presses his hot cheeks with his thumbs, and wills their eyes to meet.

“You don’t have to give me an answer right now. But next week, unless you say different, meet me here, and I’ll be packed. If it’s yes, come packed too. If not, we can call it off.”

And Spock looks like him as if he understands. And Jim thinks he does, can read him well enough. Slowly, he nods against the hands, and raises his to Jim’s and Jim takes them instead, presses them to his own face, and his mouth, until all those hands start to shake again.

“I can see the sun.” He says, and Jim thinks he agrees. So they rise, and separate, and Jim kicks the fire until they are in the dark again. He thinks to kiss Spock, a last time, but he doesn’t have it in him. It would be too much for his small planet, to take that again. 

When Spock is on his horse, pushing his hat down, clutching the reins, Jim raises his hand a last time to his ankle, level with his chest, and meets his eye.

“Remember what I said.”

“I will.”

He is far away. Jim wants to grab the reins, and pull back. He wants to lay down in his path. He wants to vault up onto the horse right behind him, and press his knees forward into the backs of his, he wants to take him by the ankle and pull him off, and be done with it. He wants Spock to stay, but he wants them to go, he wants to go with Spock, or he wants Spock not to go anywhere, Spock to leave with him. It’s too much. He is already far away. 

Jim can still see the silhouette of his nose, his pointed ear against the lightening sky, and then he can’t see him at all but for that incomprehensible thing, a shadow creature, half man and half horse, against the field ahead.


End file.
